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Halloween Post-Mortem

Halloween is over now. Time to clean up the fake spiderwebs, put away the costumes and wigs, and prepare for the long slow slide to the end of the year.

The kids and I only managed to watch one movie in preparation, “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.” I don’t think it really counts, but we haven’t had many nights at home, and there haven’t been enough good movies on Turner Classics to put on the Tivo. “Bride of the Monster” is sitting on the machine now, but I don’t think I’ll subject anybody to that.

The Halloween entertainment I’m going to miss most, surprisingly, is a song anthology that I snatched off the internet last year. “Spook Party” mixed a lot of old rockabilly and novelty songs with radio ads for “It Conquered the World” and “The 4-D Man”. Every afternoon after school, the kids put it on the CD player and drove their mom crazy. But so many of them have stuck in my head that I’ll be hearing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “Feast of the Mau-Maus” when we cut into the Thanksgiving turkey. You should all get the zip files for “Spook Party” and “Ghoul-Arama” for next year to fill your heart with creepy goodness. Go here for the files. And poke around the rest of the pages on the “Scar Stuff” blog, as you’ll find lots of strange gems.

Here’s my jack o’lantern for the year. I was pretty proud of the design, but I think next year I’ll have to let the head rot out a little more so the strings sewing the mouth shut really stand out. The problem in this neighborhood is that, no matter how much tasty garbage is overflowing in the dumpsters, the rabid squirrels feel obliged to rip apart pumpkins like wolverines going after mice. Put your pumpkin out three days before Halloween, and it will look like the Tasmanian Devil has gotten hold of it by the time the trick-or-treaters come out.

And to all the folks who decorate their houses with store-bought skeletons and blow-up ghosts, I gotta tell ya, a little ingenuity can go a long way. (Some chumbalone on my street bought little white baggies, preprinted with ghost faces, and stuffed them with a napkin or two and hung them in his tree. Store-bought, pre-printed ghost baggies? Now that’s lame.) This year I wrapped three bushes in my front yard with black nylon mesh and stuck some blinking glowing eyes inside. I wanted to make them look like large menacing blobs, kind of like that old Looney Tunes red-headed monster. The effect was okay, not great. But as a last minute inspiration, I grabbed our dog’s travel cage and some rubber monster claws from the costume bin, and made the decoration below.

People stopped and laughed at it, little kids looked at it very askance as they walked by (I can watch their expressions all day from my office on the **ahem** mezzanine level of the house). One man even took a picture of it, saying he was looking for ideas for next year. Just goes to show, a little creativity can go a long way. And it keeps the kids busy to boot.

If you want to see what our costumes were this year, visit my MySpace page.

Now, on with November. Sigh.

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Autumn Finally Shows Up

The weather has finally turned cold in Chicago, and the leaves on the trees outside my window are giving up the ghost and cascading to the sidewalk. They flutter down endlessly, like the confetti from a big party thrown for Summer, now that it’s finally gotten on the cruise liner and headed south. I hope we have a decently cold winter this year, so we can actually enjoy the snow and ice for long uninterrupted periods, and not have to endure these wet, filthy, warmish winters we’ve had lately. Maybe the past few tepid winters are what it’s like to have winter in Louisville or Cincinnati, where the season isn’t something to enjoy, but something to just muddle through. A tedious holding pattern.

Just enjoyed a few days with my mother visiting town. She came in to see the kids in their church choir musical and see some old friends, though there are becoming fewer in number than ever. That’s true both in Chicago where she grew up and in Detroit. Loneliness must be the worst thing about getting old.

These visits usually entail a few stories or facts that surprise me. First off, I should say that my family (save for my mother) is not one for small talk. It would be generous to say about my father, as she did, that he “kept his own counsel.” He basically kept his mouth shut to the point where a lot of people took offense, including my grandmother. At one point in my childhood, he famously objected to all the talking at the dinner table by asking in frustration, “What do you all think this is, a social event?”

So a visit with Mom always results in a few strange items coming to light, such as:

* My father had season tickets to see the Lions all through my childhood. I was the only son who was a sports fan, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning this, and I know for a fact I never went to a Lions game. Thanks, Dad.

* The neighbor kid, who was maybe two years older than me, would get very upset that I spoke gibberish as a toddler. My mother told him, “That’s not gibberish–he’s speaking Chinese.” The kid then grew very concerned for me, trying to make it in America and knowing only Chinese. Mom regrets pulling the kid’s chain, but he was such a dick, I’m glad she did it.

* Before my father was courted by and took a job with Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, he got a job offer in Indianapolis, doing finance for some company there. They were brought down there and dined with the bosses of the company, but at 10:00 that night, they decided to get out of their hotel room and grab a drink somewhere downtown. In all of Downtown Naptown, they couldn’t find a single tavern or bar & grill open. Thank heavens for that. If he had taken a job down there, I might have grown up with an even more nasal accent than I have now.

At some point in the weekend, the subject of my brother the actor came up, as it always does. An actor’s life is a string of disappointments and near-misses, leavened occasionally with fun and fulfilling work. Of course, a mother doesn’t want to see her son have to go through so much rejection in his life, and she doesn’t like to hear stories about the strivers, backstabbers, egoists and connivers that compete with him for roles and attention.

“He’s not ‘on’ all the time, like most of them,” she said. “I don’t know if that would help, but he’s not like that. We don’t know what it’s like to be that passionate about something, that it commands your whole life. It’s just not in our nature.”

“Our” nature meaning the Garner family makeup. Mom of course projects her insecurities (of which there are many) onto the rest of the world, and her family is the closest target, but her statement got me thinking: Does everybody out there have a “family nature”? Does every family have an indelible, immutable, defining trait? Apparently the Garner family trait is reticence and a lack of passion, in her eyes. There were three sons in the family, and we all looked very similar. People often referred to us as “the Garner boys” and “definitely Bill’s sons,” and assumed we were all like Dad: studious, smart, reserved, hard-working.

Whenever anyone asks me where my sense of humor comes from, or the source of the hamminess of my kids, my nieces and nephews, and my brother and myself, I never have an answer. I just know it didn’t come from my parents, and that our household wasn’t one of those loud, crazy Irish households where everyone was vying for attention. We were the British model that kept everything buttoned down until the seams burst. Still, that may be a formula for producing people like yours truly. If they’d sent me away to boarding school, I might have turned into a truly twisted genius.

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RIP Joey Bishop

The last of the original Rat Pack passed away yesterday, at the age of 89. Hammer another nail into the coffin of pre-hippie sixties cool, now only remembered in tribute acts and strained journalistic references to current flashes in the entertainment pan. And “Mad Men”, I guess, though I haven’t watched it yet.

What a year it’s been. Is there anyone left alive who sat on Johnny Carson’s couch when “The Tonight Show” was still based in NYC?

UPDATE: For an interesting historical perspective on the Rat Pack, and a clip from The Joey Bishop Show, check out this link to Crooks & Liars.

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Cornhole vs. Baggo

I’d like to thank my niece for pointing out that I am a man ahead of my time. Among my many far-sighted obsessions (the mayonnaise glue stick applicator, for one), I have been chronicling the controversies surrounding the state of the beanbag in recent weeks. You can read the posts here and here if you have so little to do today.

Well, my niece points out that Newsweek is reporting a new controversy over nomenclature among tailgating afficianadoes. Ever alert for the latest trend that affects our lives, the magazine states that there now exists a fight brewing about the proper name for this new generation of steroidal beanbag toss games. The contenders? Cornhole and Baggo.

Remember when George Carlin catalogued the “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”? While that list is not completely taboo anymore, I’m betting that the words “cornhole” and “baggo” can’t be used in the same paragraph on TV without getting the FCC worked up. Let me rephrase that: I’m HOPING those two words can’t be used together. Of course, I’m probably wrong. There’s probably a cop show in development for FX named “Cornhole and Baggo.”

And did you know that there was something called the American Cornhole Association? Aren’t you glad now that you do?

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A Glimpse of Human Nature

Number One Son has always been awkward in social situations. Talks too long, doesn’t read body language, only declaims on the topics in which he himself is interested, etc. It’s caused some consternation over the years, and worry and frustration, because, of course, I’d like to live his life for him to save him any hard lessons, and I’ve been a social wizard since I was 10 days old, y’see. As adolescence looms, my worries about his future social agony loom so large that I sometimes don’t even notice them anymore, as they fade into the background like traffic noise.

So today was the first day for Liam to have cello lessons at school (which of course he fought, but that’s another story). He needed to carry my wife’s cello in its heavy old case three blocks to school. As I walked the dog a discrete half-block behind him, I saw he was struggling with getting the grip. Every 20 feet, he stopped, got a different grip, and hobbled on his way. I worried about the continued health of the instrument, and his having to look like a beleaguered music geek on a tough city street.

Then, one of his classmates gained on him on the sidewalk and approached him. A girl. They acknowledged one another and started to walk to school together, sort of, nothing serious please. And what do you know? He carried that cello in one hand by his side like it was a ukulele.

It was cheering to witness this small attempt to impress someone of the opposite sex. Maybe he’ll manage to fit in sometime after all.

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Cornhole Update

No, I’m not talking about Larry Craig.

I’ve already squawked about the near-ubiquitous beanbag setups, but in that article, I quoted the wrong price for a custom-made Chicago Bears Cornhole game at a Lincoln Square boutique.

It wasn’t $65.

It was $210.

We are ALL in the wrong business.

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Weird Dream

Last night I dreamed I was playing poker with Stephen Colbert, and we were using pieces of fried chicken skin as our currency. I think this means a major appliance in my house is going to go on the fritz soon.

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Ah, Youth!

With their parents out of town for a week, some boys in Lombard, Ill., decided to put their empty backyard to use, and built a 60-foot waterslide off the back of their house. If that sounds as dangerous as it does awesome to you, check out the video by clicking here.

For once, a video of teenagers doing reckless things on the web that doesn’t result in massive injuries.

Via Gaper’s Block.

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Happy Birthday to Me

Today’s my birthday, but I will not use this space to troll for compliments, cash or free dinner coupons (I already used one last week at Jury’s). The occasion does motivate me to list a few other notable achievements that took place today, which combined with my birthday should be all the evidence you need to quit work early today and hit Attitude Adjustment Hour at the gin mill of your choice:

* The birthdays of Ingrid Bergman, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Elliott Gould, Peter Jennings and Michael Jackson.
* Fall of the Incan Empire (1533) and the old Soviet Communist Party (1991)
* According to Hoyle Day! Edmond Hoyle’s Short Treatise on whist was published in 1742.
* The invention of Chop Suey in NYC in 1896.
* National Plastic Surgery Day!

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Lessons from an Excellent Road Trip

We are now back in town, and as Number One Son headed off for school this morning, summer is officially over. It was full and hectic, and we capped it off with a seat-of-the-pants, hey-let’s-visit-the-Mystery-Spot road trip to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, so around here it really feels like it’s still early July. I was emptying a drawer and found the Fathers Day cards the kids had made me, and I had to think back to when that all happened. Now it’s back to the regular routines in Chicago, and it almost feels like we never left.

Here’s an unofficial recap of the trip:

Best city name we passed through: Herbster, WI.
Second place: Bete Grise, MI
Best breakfast place: The Tossed Egg, Bayfield, WI (their Bay Omelette was stuffed with smoked lake trout, onions, tomatoes, spinach and Parmesan cheese. Yowzah!)
Best sweet rolls and cherry pie: The Cherry Spot, Beulah, MI
Best Polish food: Legs Inn, Cross Junction, MI
Biggest forest fire: Stump Junction, MI
Best massive concrete bluegill: Orr, MN
Prettiest campsite: Fort Wilkins, MI, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula
Best lake name near that campsite: Lake Fanny Hooe
Best pasty: Muldoon’s, Munising, MI
Best juxtaposition on store sign: “Wild Rice & Lobster Tails”, Superior WI
Best ripoff casino act advertised: “Shania Twin”

And the best time overall was visiting our friends’ cabin on Lake Vermilion in MN. Look for it on a map–it’s WAY the hell up there. We heard loons morning and night, saw eagles and ospreys, sailed, napped, and took REALLY hot saunas. And I taught my host to play cribbage finally, so he can fit in with the guys over at the supper club. (As happens with all my students, he started beating me regularly.) Coming back from there was quite a culture shock. Chicago looks awful crowded by comparison. Then again, Fennville MI felt awfully crowded once we got back there. Would love to visit up there every summer, but I should check that with them first.

A whole pile of articles and essays crossed my path this summer about the decline of the American Vacation. How nobody takes road trips, how they resent taking time off, how families resent spending forced time together, etc. Maybe that’s standard magazine filler at this time of year, I don’t know, but they began to piss me off pretty quickly. In June, Newsweek ran an especially stupid essay by a mom in Jersey complaining about how their road trip was ruined because her kids were all hooked into their cellphones and ipods. It was some faux-exasperated, kids-these-days-but gee-we-came-together-anyway claptrap that was especially suspect when the writer admitted to checking her emails on her laptop a couple times a day in the car. Hey Chowderhead! Leave your laptop at home, and maybe your kids will talk to you!

On our trip we drove 2400 miles, and the most complicated electronic device we had was the car CD player. (We did have our cells along, but as if unplugged by some benevolent vacation god, the voice mail didn’t work once we drove over the Mackinac Bridge, and we gradually just stopped thinking about them.) Our kids read, drew, laced gimp, and played cards the whole way up and back. No movies, no Gameboys, no nothing. Their greatest fun was memorizing the songs on the CD by Da Yoopers we bought at their Toorist Trap in Ishpeming, with such hits as “Second Week of Deer Camp”, “Beer Guts of America” and “Diarrhea”. And by the time we got back here, this family was one well-functioning machine–with the kids helping around the house, being courteous to one another, and all that stuff that people say they’d like their kids to be but don’t take the time to teach them.

So enough with the insincere crap about how you miss the kinds of road trips you used to take when you were a kid, because Today’s Kidz just won’t stand for aimless hours in the car and tourist traps anymore. If you really want to take those trips, do the planning and teach your kids early not to depend on electronics and movies to entertain them. Teach them to set up their own tent, and suffer through a chilly morning in camp once in a while. Read books out loud to each other in the car. You’d be amazed how quickly all the “necessities” of modern life just drop by the wayside.